Handel: Messiah – Eboracum Baroque

Some churches simply sound like Handel. Saint Mary’s, Swaffham Prior, apparently is one of them — a modest Cambridgeshire parish church, not the kind of resonant barn that swallows detail whole, but a space with enough air in it to let inner voices breathe. That acoustic turns out to be the real hero of this new Messiah, recorded in 2020 by Eboracum Baroque under Chris Parsons.

I’ve lost track of how many recordings of this piece cross my desk in a given decade. Dozens, certainly, going back to my student years when Sir Malcolm Sargent’s plush, tuxedoed Huddersfield version was still the default choice for anyone who hadn’t yet heard of period style. Since then we’ve had Pinnock, Hogwood, Gardiner, McCreesh, each one stripping away another layer of Victorian upholstery until we arrived, more or less, at where we are now: small forces, edged-toned strings, brisk tempos, minimal vibrato. Parsons’s Messiah belongs to this later generation. It pushes the logic of intimacy further than most.

Eleven singers. Nine players. No vanity soloists parachuted in from the international circuit: every aria and recitative is handed to a member of the choir, and the choir itself splits 4/3/2/2. This is a collegiate reading, and I don’t intend that as faint praise. There’s something almost startling about hearing “Every valley shall be exalted” sung by a tenor who, twenty minutes later, will be blending anonymously into a four-part chorus. It flattens hierarchy. Handel himself, pragmatist that he was, would probably have approved. He wrote Messiah for forces that varied wildly from performance to performance, tinkering with keys and vocal ranges according to who happened to be available in Dublin or London that season.

The playing is lean to the point of transparency: two violins, one viola, cello, bass, two trumpets, timpani, and a chamber organ doubling harpsichord, both instruments handled by a single player, Sebastian Gillot. You feel the absence of numbers most in “Worthy is the Lamb,” which wants a wash of massed strings and simply doesn’t get one here. The climax arrives more as a bright chamber-music flourish than a cathedral-shaking peroration. I missed the weight. I’ll admit that plainly.

But — and this is where I came around — the clarity on offer elsewhere more than compensates. Fugal entries in “And with his stripes” register with a linear precision you rarely hear when forty voices are piled on top of each other. Diction throughout is exemplary. You could transcribe Jennens’s text by ear alone, consonants landing crisply against the dry acoustic bloom of the nave.

Parsons’s textual choices reveal a conductor who has done his homework without making a fetish of musicology. His decision to use the 12/8 version of “Rejoice greatly” rather than the more commonly heard 4/4 alternative struck me as exactly right. The compound meter gives the aria a skipping, dance-like lift that the duple-time version, for all its virtues, doesn’t quite match. It’s a small thing. It matters anyway.

Individual solo work is uneven, as one would expect when a choir’s own membership supplies every voice rather than a quartet of specialists. Some singers phrase with real elegance and word-sensitivity; a couple sound understandably more at home in ensemble textures than in the exposed spotlight of “The trumpet shall sound.” I won’t name names — it feels ungenerous given the collaborative spirit the whole project is built on, and frankly the trumpet obbligato itself, a little rough-edged, is more distracting than the voice above it.

Where does this leave the album, against a field crowded with Gardiner’s dramatic urgency, Pinnock’s poise, McCreesh’s scholarly rigor? Not at the summit, honestly. But it earns its place: a Messiah of genuine warmth and unpretentious intelligence, made by musicians who know this score from the inside. For listeners who want grandeur, look elsewhere. For those curious what Handel’s oratorio sounds like stripped to something close to its chamber-scale bones, sung by people who mean every word of Jennens’s text, this disc rewards the visit.